Journeys, Chapters, Actors, and Home

From my early childhood, I've had a love for travel. Nothing could match up to the rush of making the short trip to the railway station/airport, seated eagerly, waiting for the journey to start. I still love when the train starts moving or when the plane starts its sudden acceleration, quite unmatched feelings of euphoria. I can almost say that I love the journey more than the holiday itself. There's a sense of idealism in the air, and you can feel this will be a vacation to beat all else, and you have so much to look forward to. Kinda like friday evening (I've never had a school/college/work where I've had to work saturdays :) ).

Journeys are inherently interesting, to me they signal change and escape. Escape from whatever may be giving you headaches back home, and change when they mean you're moving from your home, to a new one. To tell you frankly, I never like to leave home, and I miss it a hell lot when I do. To me, vacations of rediscovering that love affair with that home you fell in love with, with all the people that make up that home. I guess places mean very little to me, only the people, but most homes tend to take a personality of their own, and become people in their own accord. But if you think I mean only the places I've stayed as my home, think again. Homes are never just houses, homes are all the places we talk about. They're that playground you used to play on, your wonderous school, or even that place you spent only a few months. A piece of us lives in each of these places, and I think you'll find, that even when you return to these places, you'll still reminesce and never find your memory's wonderland quite reflected in the actuality. That's why I feel saddened whenever a journey means leaving one of my homes, I know I'll never return to that home, only to that place, that home is forever safe in my memories. But I also feel happy, knowing I loved someone there.

Shakespeare once said that all the world's a stage, and all people are merely actors. He couldn't be more accurate. What are chapters but acts of a play, and our life lived in our various homes the settings for these acts. Each subsequent act does not make sense without the previous, but a play is simply not a single act. Each journey is a switching to a different act, set in a different home. And likewise, a play cannot make sense unless it's looked at from the spectator's point of view. One cannot make sense of anything happening in one's life unless we look at what happened dispassionately from afar, and look at how previous acts contributed to what we just saw. Just as much, we must know that no act shall be repeated, no dialogues recounted, only that fleeting memory is the life we lived. And I guess, like all great shows, an important part of a play is the cast, each one of them leaves their own indelible mark, and their place could not be taken by any other. And that their place is in their respective acts, not a moment before, not a moment after.

It lends meaning to a set of lines that's been in my head for very long, from the Lord of the Rings, "We were home. How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on... when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are somethings that time cannot mend... some hurts that go too deep... that have taken hold." It doesn't just refer to irresverisbly and mentally damaged hobbits, it has a simple enough allegory, that you cannot and must not try, to return to an old life expecting it to be the same. Places may be the same, but they are not the same home. And my reason for writing this entry? I just made a realisation that I undertook a third kind of a journey for a second time, one that I did not realise at the time. A journey from one home to another, where both acts are running simultaneously. Life, it seems, is much more complex that any play we can write, since plays still don't, nor are likely to, have parallel acts. Nor will it have acts running that the spectators do not know about, nor even the actors.